For the visual aspect of this project, I decided to make a mock ups for Hollowgrove. The first end goal of this idea was to make a game, and since then I’ve known that it’s gonna be a long time before anything of the sort actually happens, so in the meantime I figured some mock ups would be nice.

I made both of these in grafx2, a free to use pixel art program. The creatures and background were made separately, then put in with the help of layers to make sure everything fit in before getting everyone on the same page. I have a specific color palette I use for all my Hollowgrove related projects to keep everything cohesive and consistent across pieces. The menu and background share a palette of a whopping five colors, while the creatures all use a different five to ten colors depending on the elements they have.

These were made to help sell two different ideas. One is the overall aesthetic and theme of Hollowgrove. It’s meant to be grimy and dark, but visually interesting enough to pull the viewer in. The colors for each element may be different, but they all share contrasting and vibrant colors. These two for example are visually unsettling, almost confusing and grotesque in appearance. But they’re both bright and detailed, individual elements of them are clear and thanks to the other colors in the image they stand out drastically and immediately grab the attention of the viewer. The second idea is that this isn’t a story that’s told through audio or video, its told specifically through a game. Again I know that as of now there’s not real game aspect, but the ideas here show what it could be as well as what it may look like. Buttons with easy to read text that have words on them that you could find in virtually any video game, icons that represent common tropes in games such as health bars and elements, and stylized menu that’s clear and shows the “player” exactly what their options are. Of course there’s plenty of tweaking that I want to do for these concepts in the future, but that’s a problem for future me.